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I'm attempting to copy about 20,000+ files from an external Windows (NTSC) hard drive, into my internal Mac drive. The copy process gets underway, reports it will take about 23 hours. About one hour into the copy, a fault is found with a file and the copy process simply stops, no option to continue.

In the Windows world, I can use XCOPY for such a situation, where I want to copy as much as it can without stopping.

On my MacBook (10.6.8), how can I execute an unconditional copy? And unattended, I can't babysit the process for 23 hours.

Your external drive is formatted to "NTFS" not "NTSC" (that's a TV broadcast standard). There may be a way to do it by using the Terminal (command line). Perhaps one of coder experts can come up with a way for you.

When the external drive is plugged in, it will show up in /Volumes with whatever the name of the drive is. So open up a Terminal window and look at the following commands. You will need to get some information before the commands will do anything, do not type them in blindly

For the command line portion of this you can just use the ~/Documents folder and create a new folder to hold the pictures, as I've done above. Now the "cp" command will recursively copy everything from the external HD to Pictures_Import directory. If there certain sub directories on the external drive that you only care about, then you'll want to add those to the "cp" line.

For example, if the external drive is called "Storage", then the command would be "cp -aR /Volumes/Storage/* Pictures_Import", now if you had a directory on that drive called Pictures, then the command would change to "cp -aR /Volumes/Storage/Pictures/* Pictures_Import"

I suppose this question is for Razor and cradom - would you not want to add -f to force the copy in case of a bad/corrupt file? Would cp terminate if it hit something it couldn't copy or would it just continue?

The "cp" would only fail if it had a physical error reading the source files. I avoid using "-f" since that would overwrite any local files by force and doesn't actually control continuing one when an issue is encountered. If there is an underlying issue, then "cp" would halt/fail just like the Finder/UI was..

This external hard drive CANNOT be seen/read on my Windows computer, but my MacBook does see it and I can extract random files off it onto a USB thumb drive. My objective is to extract some 20,000+ files (64gigs) from the "My Documents" directory, into my MacBook, so that I can write all those files back out to my main Windows computer, through my home network.

In my MacBook, I've created a new folder "Temp" to receive everything. Trouble is, when using a simple drag/drop, there are a few files that create the following error:

The Finder canít complete the operation because some data in ďTEMPLATE6.pubĒ canít be read or written.
(Error code -36)

When that error is encountered, the copy process comes to a complete halt, with no option to continue.

So far, all attempts to use the cp command through Terminal have failed completely, each attempt simply generating the correct syntax I should be using. Not a single file has transferred so far.

I'm hopeful of coming up with a command string that will tell the cp command to pass over an error file and keep going until all is done some 23 hours later, all unattended.

For *NIX based wild cards *.* is redundant - * will cover everything. Really * is match everything. '.' matches a single "anything" So in old dos days you needed *.* when the . was counted as a separator but you don't need that in modern *nix based systems. When you say *.* you are saying match anything - anyway. Mac OS X Commands and Wildcard Characters ę Mac Apple Tips
(You could see there is an example to pick only files *\.*) but that is an escaped . meaning find only files with dots in them but you don't have to keep that convention.

According to this - the -R should keep copying even with errorsLoadingÖ
So it may be lower level than that.

I had used flow when moving around a large amount of data - seemed to work quite well as it was designed for ftp/sftp but it would move data across local locations too.Flow &mdash; The Mac's Best FTP + SFTP Client
$5 in the appstore - I got it with a bundle so that is why I had it. It worked for me - even with errors but if even cp -R doesn't work then I'm not sure anything will.